It's got a hell of a good cast to make it all go down very easy. Wittily written by Colin Higgins ("Harold and Maude") and efficiently directed by Arthur Hiller ("Love Story"), it runs pretty long at an hour and 54 minutes but is breezy enough to never *feel* that long. It's got thrills, spills, gags, intrigue, and romance. The first film to team legendary funny men Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, "Silver Streak" is a respectful Hitchcock homage done with much style and humour. The older I'm getting the more I enjoy his music and respect his enormous body of work. It has a pleasant musical score by Henry Mancini, this great eclecticist of the 20th century. Silver Streak is an entertaining and in a positive way - forgettable movie. His name was Pierre Richard and his fame reached its zenith at about the same time as Wilder's before fizzling out somewhere in the eighties, when the Stallones and Schwarzeneggers took over.
UNBEATABLE WHITE LABEL TRAIN STATION MOVIE
Come to think of it, in France they had a movie comedian who looked very similar to Wilder. I doubt if someone like Gene Wilder wold make it as a movie star today the public, it seems, needs the grimaces of Jim Carrey to be amused. In a strange way, this movie really represents a better, unattainable world. Nothing and nobody is taken too seriously, conquests are made without effort, failure is accepted with grace. A lot of the movie deals with masculinity and the assertion of it. Everything about Silver Streak is so unpretentious, seeing it today that really was a kind of a revelation to me. ordinary and normal and also kind hearted.
Characters like the ones played by Wilder, Clayburgh or Pryor seem to have become extinct in the movies, I mean. It is an unusual mixture of comedy, action thriller and disaster movie. Now, a good 30 years later, I watched Silver Streak a second time. Stuff like that attracted me much more than movies with Robert Redford or Charles Bronson who then were the big male heroes of the screen. Gene Wilder was the star, that was one more reason for me to see it, as I had greatly enjoyed his performance in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein. It was sold, I think, as a Hitchcock parody and I thought parodies were great. I saw this film in the cinema as a teenager when it came out. Hitchcock fans will see this as a mild takeoff on "North by Northwest." It is, but it stands on its own as well. It works perfectly against the comic aspects of the film. McGoohan and Walston act as if they're in a heavy duty suspense film, which makes them real and threatening. There are lots of funny scenes in this film, but the best part of it is the chemistry between Wilder and Pryor, who became a successful screen team.
In the funniest scene in the film, Grover has George buy the cap, shoe polish, sunglasses and radio from a shoe polisher at the train station and makes George a black jiver so he can get by the feds. One of those times, he meets up with a criminal, Grover Muldoon (Pryor) who happens to be in the police car he steals. Not only that, he keeps getting thrown off of the train. In a quasi-homage to Hitchcock, Wilder plays George Caldwell, who falls for the lovely Hilly (Jill Clayburgh) and finds himself mixed up in art fraud, missing letters of Rembrandt, and murder.
Gene Wilder is the ordinary man caught up in murder and mayhem on the train "Silver Streak" in this 1976 comedy starring Richard Pryor, Jill Clayburgh, Ned Beatty, Ray Walston, and Patrick McGoohan.
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